Update: Old Weather and Naval History

The Old Weather Citizen Science project continues to collect historical air pressure, wind speed, temperature and other atmospheric information from ships' logs in an attempt to better understand historical weather patterns worldwide. Now the Naval-History.net project wants to take advantage of this information gathered by citizen scientists to study the history of each ship, as told in their logs.

Naval-History.net archivist Gordon Smith is leading the process of converting the events records the Old Weather project has collected into ship histories. These ship histories include all the transcribed events day-by-day, and allow everybody to follow the actions of the ships as described in each log's "terse but fascinating style." To date information about the Acacia, Cochrane, Eskimo, Goliath, M.25, Saxon, Warrego and another 50-odd ships have been converted into histories available on the Naval-History Web site.

What Is Citizen Science?

Research often involves teams of scientists collaborating across continents. Now, using the power of the Internet, non-specialists are participating, too. Citizen Science falls into many categories. A pioneering project was SETI@Home, which has harnessed the idle computing time of millions of participants in the search for extraterrestrial life. Citizen scientists also act as volunteer classifiers of heavenly objects, such as in Galaxy Zoo. They make observations of the natural world, as in The Great Sunflower Project. And they even solve puzzles to design proteins, such as FoldIt. We'll add projects regularly—and please tell us about others you like as well.